Mashantucket police chief resigns amid move to take on Foxwoods beat

Published May 31. 2012 9:00PM | Updated June 01. 2012 9:20AM

By MICHAEL MELIA, Associated Press

Mashantucket — The Mashantucket Pequot tribe is moving to give its police department a larger role inside its Foxwoods Resort Casino, but several former department employees say it can barely manage to patrol the tiny reservation, let alone the Western Hemisphere's largest casino.

And the tribe's chief of police, Daniel Collins, submitted his resignation Thursday.

Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation officers drive cruisers and carry guns, but the former employees say they resemble private security guards more than agents of the law. The department takes orders directly from tribal council members, blocks officers from pursuing investigations and has turned a blind eye to the sale of illegal drugs, ex-officers said in interviews with The Associated Press.

"The chief doesn't want tribal members to be investigated, to be prosecuted in any way, because then it comes back on him," said Steve Saucier, who worked part-time for the department until leaving in November. "If we do arrest somebody and it goes to tribal court, they throw it out. It does absolutely nothing."

The tribe has been pressing for its own police to replace state troopers in the casino — a change that could bring millions of dollars in savings annually for the Pequots, who have to reimburse the state for security coverage and are struggling with more than $2 billion in debt. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's office, which wants to put more troopers on the roads, already has reduced the security bill conditionally as it waits for tribal officers to obtain certifications they would need to be able to arrest non-tribal members.

The tribe's chief of police, Daniel Collins, resigned following inquiries to the tribe by the AP. His departure was announced internally on Thursday, said two tribal government employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal affairs. A spokesman for the tribe did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment about the resignation.

When The Day placed a call to Collins on his cellphone Thursday evening, a woman who answered said Collins did not want to comment on his no longer being tribal police chief. Earlier, sources said tribal officials had first asked Collins to resign Wednesday.

A dispatcher who answered a call to the tribal police department referred a Day reporter with questions about Collins' status to the tribe's public affairs office, which was closed. Calls to tribal officials' cellphones went unanswered.

In response to the AP's findings, Mike Lawlor, the governor's liaison on criminal justice policy, said the agreement to reduce the tribe's security bill depends on tribal police agreeing to abide by the state's standards. He said state attorneys are working out how to determine whether and when the tribe is ready.

"It's definitely in their interest to get them into a position where they would have full-fledged powers," Lawlor said. "If they don't, they won't get them."

The tribal council defended its police force.

"The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation police force is fully trained and very competent to continue the policing of our gaming enterprise," the council said in a written statement.

One of the most pressing obstacles would be manpower.

As part of their proposal in July, the Pequots told Malloy's office they have 15 police officers, according to documents obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request.

But the tribal police department has only nine officers, including the chief and two officers who recently joined from a training academy, according to two tribal government employees who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal affairs. Former officers say the department is stretched so thin that officers barely can cover shifts, and emergency calls about fights and domestic disputes at times have to wait. Roughly 900 tribal members live in and around the Pequots' 2-square-mile reservation. Some tribal officers have American Indian heritage but they are not required to be Pequot members.

"There were calls we couldn't get to right away, calls that had to wait because we didn't have any officers to send," said Robert Standeford, who left the tribal police in 2010 after a decade of service. "I always called for state backup when we needed it, but that wasn't a practice they wanted."

The tribe did not respond to requests to interview Collins, a Marine Corps veteran who required that officers salute him.

Several former officers said the chief took instructions directly from tribal members. They say he did not direct officers not to arrest certain individuals, but would classify sensitive cases as investigations and allow them to languish indefinitely.

In one case, Standeford said, the police chief told officers not to pursue what could have been a major drug bust. The tribe was holding an annual outdoor celebration about five years ago in a part of the reservation known as Stump Mountain when officers stopped a man with a large baggie full of marijuana. The man told officers he got the drugs from a white van that was loaded with marijuana. But Standeford said the chief told officers to release the man, had them dump the drugs on the ground and spoke with the van driver, who then drove off the reservation.

"You don't just dump drugs when you tell everyone in the community we're working to make it better," he said.

Foxwoods, which receives tens of thousands of visitors daily, currently has state troopers stationed around the clock inside the casino, where they made 181 arrests in 2010, mostly for assault or larceny. The Pequots have been required to pay $4 million annually for the services of the state Department of Public Safety, including about state 20 troopers who are backed by tribal police and a large private security force.

In letters to state government officials last summer, tribal Chairman Rodney Butler said the Pequots would no longer pay for troopers to be stationed in the casino, and said the tribe would pursue a lawsuit if an agreement were not reached with the governor's office.

Ultimately, the state agreed to reduce assessments for the Pequots as well as the Mohegan Tribe, which owns the nearby Mohegan Sun casino. Lawlor said the Mohegan police have the certifications needed to assume a larger role as soon as the paperwork is processed, but he said it would take longer for the Pequots' police.

Tom Olsen, a Ledyard police officer who worked for Pequot police in the 1990s, said tribal officers have struggled with many of the same issues for years.

"The administration of that police department has to answer in a different way than a town's department would. They are beholden to what the council might say because they hold the purse strings," he said. "The bottom line is there are different rules there."